NVIDIA GeForce 3 Titanium 500 Review

Introduction

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On October 1st NVIDIA released their latest incarnation, the Geforce Titanium 500.

The Ti500 is clocked higher than its older brother with 40 MHz advantage in memory and the GPU core; this doesn't sound that much but with the added memory bandwidth this equates to 655 MB/ sec. more that the standard Geforce 3.

GeForce3 Ti 500 and the GeForce3 Ti 200 also bring us two new features, the first one is Shadow Buffer Technology and secondly 3D Textures. These new features, combined with the nfiniteFX Engine and the Lightspeed Memory Architecture, deliver the most visually compelling and complete graphics experience available today.

The two new features are not hardware based so any old Geforce 3 with the XP drivers will be able to utilize these features, but Nvidia think that the Ti 500 is the first card that is fast enough to use the shadow buffer & 3D Textures.

NVIDIA's programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders, and 3D textures. The nfiniteFX engine gives developers the freedom to program a virtually infinite number of custom special effects, in order to create true-to-life characters and environments.

Part of the nfiniteFX engine, Vertex Shaders are used to breathe life and personality into characters and environments. For example, through vertex shading developers can create true-to-life dimples or wrinkles that appear when a character smiles.

Delivers fluid frame rates of 60 frames per second or more at high resolutions, such as 1024x768x32 or higher, with full-scene antialiasing (FSAA) turned on. Featuring the Quincunx AA mode, HRAA delivers a high level of detail and performance for all applications.

NVIDIA memory bandwidth optimizations designed to make complex scenes faster. These optimizations make full-scene antialiasing (FSAA) practical for the first time, enabling users to enjoy high-resolution antialiasing (HRAA).